Factory Settings

Learning what to let go and what to reclaim

The call with Alice lasted two hours. At some point, as she described a friend who had been showing up for her — the late-night messages, the steady presence, the particular kind of help only proximity and expertise can offer — I heard the old voice arrive right on cue. That should be me. I am that friend. I listened to what that voice said. Still on the call, still listening, I watched myself think my way past it. She has exactly what she needs. And even if I were there, I am not the most qualified person in her life for this. I told her I was grateful she had someone. I felt lighter. Later, something that I can only describe as pride filled my chest — not in her, but in myself. Something had shifted, and I’d caught it happening in real time.

I have been recalibrating. I know this now, in the way you only ever know it from the other side — looking back at a period that looked, while you were in it, like stalling. Messy. Like wasted time. Like a woman who had moved across the world and couldn’t quite find her footing. What I couldn’t see then was that finding your footing isn’t always the point. Sometimes the ground itself is being remade beneath you.

We often think of recalibration as simply adjusting or modifying, changing the way we do or think about something to be more effective. More accurately, recalibration is defined as a comparison against a known standard and adjusting back to that standard. Devices that are moved, used in tough conditions, or work hard often need recalibration more than those in steady conditions.

What is that known standard, though, for a person? Culture, family, society, Instagram? They all seem to have opinions. Rules even.

Science questions whether a fixed true self exists, even though people often act as if it does. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described the ‘true self’ as a feeling of authenticity and vitality. In contrast, the ‘false self’ is the protective mask that can leave you feeling empty behind the façade. He believed the true self is a natural state we can return to, not something we achieve.

The true self isn’t something you build. It’s something you discover by peeling away defensive layers.

Arriving in Scotland three years ago, I had expected things around me would be different. What I didn’t factor in was how immediately changed I would be. Things I used to do fluently suddenly took effort. Relationships looked different, and for a while, I didn’t understand why.

It was like I had called an IT help desk to complain that my computer wasn’t working. When they turned me off and on again, a new operating system was installed without me knowing. The old programs — how I communicated and made decisions, how I behaved — were incompatible with the new operating system. And there was no instruction manual.

How things interacted with one another changed the results, rubbing up against each other in new ways. When one thing would seem clearer, when I worked one thing out, the ground would shift again.

Then the move to London required a patch to be installed to deal with the new air, the new beats to my day. It was challenging to handle things gracefully. Life felt messy.

I am a perfectionist. I don’t do messy. Spring cleaning has always brought its own sort of nightmare – the loss of control over the whole house, everything tipped upside down. I only ever tackle things room by room, so I can celebrate each achievement before I move to the next. With my new life, rooms opened before I was ready. Other people shifted things. Opportunities arrived ahead of schedule.

The upgrade was running while I was doing the internal spring clean, in a sequence I didn’t choose. It was exhausting. Terrifying.

I didn’t know I was recalibrating. From inside, it sometimes looked like wasted time. Drift. Self-indulgence. Bashing myself up for not moving forward — not realising that not being able to move forward with clarity was the process, not a failure of it.

Recalibration is also hard to recognise from inside when some of the noise obscuring your signal isn’t your own. Sometimes I was trying to find my true reading while running someone else’s interference. You can’t calibrate accurately against a known standard when the instrument is full of someone else’s static. Someone else’s instructions about who I am and how I should be.

Which means part of the subtraction — part of the clearing — is recognising which thoughts are actually yours.

Recalibration isn’t addition. It’s subtraction.

The recent lessons and reminders to myself that my brain is rewiring have been empowering. The friend in Australia — releasing the need to be the hero, feeling only gratitude. Another time, just the other day, when imposter syndrome, triggered by someone presenting an idea similar to mine, threatened to undo weeks of work and send my confidence spiralling. After the initial panic, though, I naturally took myself through the steps I needed to re-ground myself and land in self-trust.

I can now see, from ground that no longer shifts beneath every step, a place I finally recognise. I have not been building a new version of myself. I have been letting my true self be known, clearing what was never really me. I wasn’t aware of the standard in advance, but I recognised it when it arrived.